17-year-old Sarah Hendrickson won the inaugural women's ski jumping World Cup circuit overall title in Zao, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan. With two jumps of 99.5 meters Sarah Hendrickson beat Japan's Sara Takanashi, but lost to the Japanese champion in the second event on Saturday. Then on Sunday, Sarah had jumps of 98 and 94.5 meters, which brought her total to 249.1 points, giving her the eighth World Cup victory in 12 events. The teenaged Hendrickson had won the inaugural World Cup meet in Lillehammer, Norway, last December. "I admired Lindsey Vonn for winning the overall World Cup title and I wanted to follow her path," Hendrickson told USA Today. "I won the first individual event and the overall title, and it will take months if not years for this to sink in."
The teenaged ski jumping champion was born in Salt Lake and raised in Park City, Utah. Sarah Hendrickson has been skiing since she was 2, and has an older brother Nick, who is on the U.S. Nordic combined team. Although female ski jumpers were ignored by the IOC for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, their event has been approved for the 2014 Sochi Games. "At the US team, we have been training for quite a few years now," Sarah says. "We train for competition. Once you get to the jumping level of training, you have to train like you're competing. Ski jumping is a huge, huge, huge mental game. That's a huge part of it."
